Rose Styron

Last updated

Rose Burgunder Styron (born April 4, 1928) is an American poet, journalist, and human rights activist. [1] She is a founding member of Amnesty International USA, [2] [3] becoming a board member in 1970. [4]

Contents

Styron is the subject of the documentary In the Company of Rose, directed by James Lapine, which debuted in 2022. [5] [6] Her most recent book is a memoir, Beyond This Harbor, published in 2023. [7]

Early life and education

Rose Burgunder Styron was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1928, [8] where she spent her childhood. The daughter of B. B. Burgunder (father) and Selma Kann, (mother), [9] her family's heritage was German Jewish, [10] though it was described as a secular, non-observant Jewish household. [8] She attended grade school at the Quaker Friends School of Baltimore. [4]

Burgunder attended Wellesley College, where she graduated in 1950 with a Bachelor of Arts Degree. [11] She was Class Poet and won Wellesley's John Masefield Prize for "the best poem written by a member of the senior class." [4] Next, she earned her MFA at Johns Hopkins University, where she met her future husband, novelist William Styron, when she attended a reading he was giving. Burgunder said that, for her, this first meeting was not memorable. [4]

Career as a human rights activist

Rose Styron joined Amnesty International USA in 1970, after attending a writer's conference in Moscow and Tashkent. [3] She has chaired PEN’s Freedom-to-Write Committee and the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Awards, and has served on the boards of the Academy of American Poets, the Association to Benefit Children, and The Brain and Creativity Institute at USC. [3] Styron is a fellow at the Kennedy Institute of Politics and was on the Council on Foreign Relations. [4] [2]

Styron’s 2023 memoir Beyond This Harbor is partly about her work as an activist, which involved traveling around the world, working to free prisoners of conscience. Writing about Styron’s memoir, Harvey Wasserman describes it as being, in part, “a harrowing travelogue through eastern Europe and southeast Asia to the unspeakable travesties of our own horrific prisons and the infuriating hypocrisies of our worst politicians.” [12]

Writing career

Styron is the author of four volumes of poetry. She has known that poetry was her deepest calling since the age of 9. [4] Styron has worked as a translator on two books of Russian poetry, and has been a contributor to various other writing projects. These include interviews, book reviews, and essays for American Poetry Review, The Paris Review, Ramparts, and the New York Times. [3]

As a journalist, Styron has published articles on human rights and foreign policy in many magazines, newspapers, and journals. Some of the publications include The New York Review of Books, [13] The Nation, and The New Republic. [3]

As an "upholder of her husband's legacy," after William Styron’s death in 2006, [8] she edited The Selected Letters of William Styron, a project that was a two-year commitment.

Rose Styron was finally able to assemble a new book of her own poems, Fierce Day, published in 2015. It was her first new volume of poems since By Vineyard Light appeared in 1995. She says: "I became obsessed with helping to change antihuman policies abroad. I stopped writing poetry. For twenty years." [8]

Personal life

In 1952, while doing a fellowship at the American Academy in Rome, Burgunder renewed a passing acquaintance with a young novelist, William Styron, who had just won the Rome Prize for his novel Lie Down in Darkness . [9] For their first date, they were chaperoned by Truman Capote. Before the date was over, Capote told Styron that he needed to marry this woman. [7]

They were married in Rome in the spring of 1953. Together, they had four children: daughter Susanna Styron is a film director; daughter Paola is an internationally acclaimed modern dancer; daughter Alexandra Styron is a writer, known for the 2001 novel All The Finest Girls and her memoir Reading My Father published in 2011; son Thomas is a professor of clinical psychology at Yale University.

Rose Styron raised her family in Roxbury, Connecticut, but they often spent extended summers in Martha’s Vineyard [13] where she now permanently resides.

Selected bibliography

Poetry volumes
Memoir
Translator
Editor
Contributor

Notes

    Related Research Articles

    <span class="mw-page-title-main">Sylvia Plath</span> American poet and writer (1932–1963)

    Sylvia Plath was an American poet, novelist, and short story writer. She is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and is best known for The Colossus and Other Poems (1960), Ariel (1965), and The Bell Jar, a semi-autobiographical novel published shortly before her suicide in 1963. The Collected Poems was published in 1981, which included previously unpublished works. For this collection Plath was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1982, making her the fourth to receive this honor posthumously.

    <span class="mw-page-title-main">William Styron</span> American writer (1925–2006)

    William Clark Styron Jr. was an American novelist and essayist who won major literary awards for his work.

    <span class="mw-page-title-main">Edith Sitwell</span> British poet and critic (1887–1964)

    Dame Edith Louisa Sitwell was a British poet and critic and the eldest of the three literary Sitwells. She reacted badly to her eccentric, unloving parents and lived much of her life with her governess. She never married but became passionately attached to Russian painter Pavel Tchelitchew, and her home was always open to London's poetic circle, to whom she was generous and helpful.

    <span class="mw-page-title-main">Ernest Dowson</span> English writer (1867–1900)

    Ernest Christopher Dowson was an English poet, novelist, and short-story writer who is often associated with the Decadent movement.

    <span class="mw-page-title-main">Billy Collins</span> American poet

    William James Collins is an American poet who served as the Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003. He was a Distinguished Professor at Lehman College of the City University of New York, retiring in 2016. Collins was recognized as a Literary Lion of the New York Public Library (1992) and selected as the New York State Poet for 2004 through 2006. In 2016, Collins was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. As of 2020, he is a teacher in the MFA program at Stony Brook Southampton.

    Dorothy Violet Wellesley, Duchess of Wellington, styled Lady Gerald Wellesley between 1914 and 1943, was an English author, poet, literary editor and socialite.

    <span class="mw-page-title-main">Mark Strand</span> Canadian-American poet, essayist, translator

    Mark Strand was a Canadian-born American poet, essayist and translator. He was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1990 and received the Wallace Stevens Award in 2004. Strand was a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University from 2005 until his death in 2014.

    <span class="mw-page-title-main">Alicia Ostriker</span> American poet and scholar (born 1937)

    Alicia Suskin Ostriker is an American poet and scholar who writes Jewish feminist poetry. She was called "America's most fiercely honest poet" by Progressive. Additionally, she was one of the first women poets in America to write and publish poems discussing the topic of motherhood. In 2015, she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. In 2018, she was named the New York State Poet Laureate.

    <span class="mw-page-title-main">Louise Bogan</span> American poet

    Louise Bogan was an American poet. She was appointed the fourth Poet Laureate to the Library of Congress in 1945, and was the first woman to hold this title. Throughout her life she wrote poetry, fiction, and criticism, and became the regular poetry reviewer for The New Yorker.

    <span class="mw-page-title-main">Jean Garrigue</span> American poet

    Jean Garrigue was an American poet. In her lifetime, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a nomination for a National Book Award.

    Lorna Gaye Goodison CD is a Jamaican poet, essayist and memoirist, a leading West Indian writer, whose career spans four decades. She is now Professor Emerita, English Language and Literature/Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan, previously serving as the Lemuel A. Johnson Professor of English and African and Afroamerican Studies. She was appointed Poet Laureate of Jamaica in 2017, serving in the role until 2020.

    <i>Darkness Visible</i> (memoir) Book by William Styron

    Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness is a memoir by American writer William Styron about his descent into depression and the triumph of recovery. It is among the last books published by Styron and is among his most celebrated.

    Marcia Nardi (1901–1990), born Lillian Massell in Boston, Massachusetts, was an American poet.

    <span class="mw-page-title-main">Jill Bialosky</span> American writer

    Jill Bialosky is an American poet, novelist, essayist and executive book editor. She is the author of four volumes of poetry, three novels, and two recent memoirs. She co-edited with Helen Schulman an anthology, Wanting a Child. Her poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, O Magazine, Real Simple, American Scholar, The Kenyon Review, Harvard Review, and chosen for Best American Poetry, among others.

    <span class="mw-page-title-main">Jessica Fisher</span> American poet, translator, and critic

    Jessica Fisher is an American poet, translator, and critic. In 2012, she was awarded the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize Fellowship in literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

    Jennifer S. Clarvoe is an American poet and English professor at Kenyon College. She has published two books of poetry, Invisible Tender and Counter-Amores. She won the Kate Tufts Discovery Award in 2001.

    Susan Brind Morrow is an American author and poet who has written extensively on language and metaphor drawn from the natural world. Morrow has published translations of Greek, Latin, and Arabic poetry, and hieroglyphic texts.

    Madhur Anand is a Canadian poet and professor of ecology and environmental sciences. She was born in Thunder Bay, Ontario and lives in Guelph, Ontario.

    <span class="mw-page-title-main">Alexandra Styron</span> American author and professor

    Claire Alexandra Styron, known as Alexandra Styron, is an American author and professor.

    <span class="mw-page-title-main">Luella J. B. Case</span> American author, hymn writer (1807-1857)

    Luella J. B. Case was a 19th-century American author. She wrote several popular books and was a contributor to various periodicals, including The Rose of Sharon, The Ladies' Repository, and The Universalist Review among others. Affiliated with the Universalist church, she also wrote hymns.

    References

    1. ↑ Poets, Academy of American. "Rose Styron". Poets.org.
    2. 1 2 "Rose Styron". as.nyu.edu.
    3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 "Rose Styron | The Institute of Politics at Harvard University". iop.harvard.edu.
    4. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 "Weaving a Literary Life". Martha's Vineyard Magazine. August 1, 2013.
    5. ↑ "IN THE COMPANY OF ROSE".
    6. ↑ Kenny, Glenn (June 29, 2023). "Review: 'In the Company of Rose' Is a Pleasant Portrait". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 2023-06-29.
    7. 1 2 Rocca, Mo (July 9, 2023). "The adventures of Rose Styron – CBS News". www.cbsnews.com.
    8. 1 2 3 4 "Shelf Awareness for Readers for Friday, June 16, 2023". www.shelf-awareness.com.
    9. 1 2 "Timeline │ The Official Webpage about American Author William Styron". William-Styron.com. August 25, 2018.
    10. ↑ "Beyond This Harbor by Rose Styron: 9780525659020 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books". PenguinRandomhouse.com.
    11. ↑ "What a Life! | Wellesley Magazine". magazine.wellesley.edu.
    12. ↑ Wasserman, Harvey (July 7, 2023). "Rose Styron's Gentle, Riveting 'Beyond this Harbor'". Progressive.org.
    13. 1 2 "Rose Styron: Contributor's page". New York Review of Books.
    This page is based on this Wikipedia article
    Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
    Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.